Leave Marketing to the Professionals

While everyone is good at something, no one person is an expert in everything.

A house needs a new roof, for example. Sure, the homeowner could save on labor costs by attempting the work alone, but a lack of experience suggests the likelihood for additional repair costs in the future. In the long run, it is more cost-effective to trust an expert with the job. The same can be said for marketing initiatives.

“What we find, in many cases, are companies that try to cut corners by dumping more than one duty onto one person,” said Mandy McEwen, founder of Mod Girl Marketing. “Businesses will hire one digital marketing person who wears many hats, covering all of the social media, blog content, pay-per-click campaigns, mobile marketing and web design. However, they find that they are not getting the results they want.”

Some businesses keep marketing tasks in-house but forego hiring an internal marketing team, instead directing existing employees to do the work. This makes training programs and continual updating of marketing tools and technologies necessary, which means additional cost for the company. Passing off marketing duties to those not specifically trained in such work can ultimately lead to poor performance and burnout, too, which, in turn, can lead to turnover — this is both unproductive and expensive. According to information from Mod Girl, a company’s marketing work — “when run by untrained, overburdened individuals” — is simply not as efficient as it could be.

So while keeping marketing work in-house appears at first glance to be the most economical and easier route, it can actually present more challenges. Businesses opting to hire an internal marketing team often do so because they will be acclimated to the company’s culture and focus, and can be managed closely. However, this can also result in considerable expenses.

Information from Practical Ecommerce, which provides information to help ecommerce businesses, notes that the cost of hiring an in-house team is prohibitive for the amount of work, typically because the task is not full time. And hiring a highly skilled person for a part-time position on-staff can be expensive.

Utilizing an outside agency to handle specific marketing tasks saves money, as the agency is paid solely for the job at hand. This also allows companies to keep focus on their business as a whole, while knowing that their marketing initiatives are in expert, capable hands.

An increasing number of companies are electing to go with outside marketing experts, particularly with digital marketing. A 2013 study by Gartner, an information technology research and advisory company, found that as much as 50 percent of companies surveyed outsource digital marketing activities — including social media, content creation, mobile marketing, ecommerce and website maintenance.

Non-digital marketing in ways such as press releases, ad copywriting and design, as well as white papers, newsletters, brochures and others, can be, in many cases, best left to experts in those fields. According to Entrepreneur Media, leaving such work to the experts shows an understanding of the company’s limitations and ensures that “content marketing is as high-quality and effective as possible. And delegating it to the experts … can achieve just that.”

Analytics, content creation and management are a focus for outsourcing, according to the Gartner report. “Monitoring and analyzing social activities require time and new technologies. And keeping customers interested through social channels requires constant feeding and nurturing with new content,” the study found, noting that utilizing an outside agency for digital marketing activities is a good tactic when the in-house resources to stay on top of quickly changing technologies and techniques don’t exist.

“There is no point in spending your time doing something that can be done more professionally by others at a much lower cost,” according to information from Marketing Stream, a platform for content creation, social media management, email marketing and pay-per-click campaigns. Outsourcing to a team that already has the skills to hit the ground running will save money, time and other valuable resources.